Child Welfare
MLRI’s child welfare advocates work with state officials, policy makers and other advocacy groups to promote policies and practices that are family-centered and achieve outcomes most favorable for the low-income children and families whom we serve. Maintaining the continuity of the family and ensuring that children and families have the support services and assistance they need to grow and succeed in a safe, stable and nurturing environment are the cornerstones of MLRI’s child welfare advocacy.
MLRI has also taken the lead in advocating for greater transparency and accountability within the Massachusetts Department of Children and Families (DCF) with respect to its administrative practices and allocation of resources.
Preserving the Services Families Need to Keep Children Safely at Home:
MLRI’s primary child welfare focus is ensuring that low-income families have the support, services and assistance they need to raise their children in a safe, stable and nurturing environment. In those instances where a child must be temporarily removed from his or her biological parents, MLRI advocates for policies that encourage the reunification, when appropriate, of children and parents in as safely and as possible.
Thanks to the advocacy of MLRI and our allies, the state’s FY 2011 budget contained, for the first time, a separate line item for family preservation and support services. The inclusion of this line item not only helps to protect funding for services to keep children in their homes, but also enables the legislature to monitor and protect the agency’s spending on these services. In addition, the budget language also requires DCF to report on its provision of family preservation and support services, its provision of voluntary services and its provision of emergency shelter services to families affected by domestic violence.
MLRI recently worked very effectively with the Department of Children and Families and the Department of Elementary and Secondary Education to ensure that all foster care families were notified that their foster children were eligible for free school meals, and to ensure that enrollment was as easy as possible for these families.
Promoting the Placement of Children with Kinship Caregivers:
Of course, there will be scenarios in which parents are unable to care for their children on a long-term or permanent basis. Under these circumstances, MLRI works to ensure that all possible efforts are made to identify and support extended family members who can provide the care children need, rather than immediately turning to foster placement with someone the child doesn’t know or other residential care. Kinship caregivers often enable children to remain within their families in an environment that nurtures their cultural and linguistic heritage, prevents their separation from siblings, and allows them to maintain relationships with their biological parents as appropriate.
MLRI works closely with state child welfare officials, policy makers and other advocacy groups to promote policies that support kinship care and to ensure adequate funding is available to support and assist them in caring for the children in their custody. Our recent successes include:
•Inclusion of language in the state budget requiring the Department of Children and Families – the states’s child welfare agency or “DCF” to place the highest priority on identifying kinship caregivers when the child’s parents can not care for them;
•Inclusion of a requirement in the DCF budget that it report to the legislature on its provision of kinship guardianship subsidies and its efforts to seek newly available federal reimbursement for a portion of those subsidies
Enabling Families to Challenge DCF Decisions that Affect their Children’s Lives:
MLRI has taken the lead on raising public awareness that the the current administrative hearing system for our child welfare department is broken and routinely denies families their right to challenge high-stakes decisions which affect their children’s lives. Following up on the interest it generated, MLRI has undertaken a multi-pronged campaign to reform the state’s administrative hearing system, ensuring that hearings are scheduled and decided within mandatory time frames, thus clearing up the system’s enormous backlog, and ensuring that administrative decisions are timely, independent and fair.
As a result of our advocacy, DCF has agreed to increase its hearing officer staff, make personnel changes in the administrative hearings division, and is now revising its hearing system to make it more timely, independent and fair.
Supporting Children by Supporting their Families: Working Collaboratively Across a Range of Advocacy Areas with our New England and National Partners
MLRI’s work on behalf of low-income children and families is not limited solely to the efforts of our child welfare advocates. Indeed, the issues that directly affect children and families reach across the spectrum of MLRI's poverty law fields. MLRI supports by supporting their families. We are excited to report that MLRI has recently joined the New England Consortium, a group of advocacy programs from all the New England states that work collaboratively on both the federal and regional level for policies that support children and their families. This collaboration will strengthen MLRI’s voice throughout New England and nationally and will allow us to leverage the impact of our advocacy on behalf of children.
MLRI’s recent cross-substantive work on behalf of children includes:
•Protect children affected by domestic violence in private custody and visitation cases;
•Increase the availability of materials and support services in other languages for non-English speaking parents and kinship caregivers;
•Preserve access to emergency shelter for homeless families with children;
•Ensure children and families are able to access to TAFDC. SNAP (Food Stamps) and free school meals; and
•Protect the rights of immigrant children who have been abused, abandoned or neglected to receive a green card through the Special Immigrant Juvenile Status statute.